The Berlin Wall photo I didn't find.

Radesh is lying on the parapet, staring at me with one critical eye- the other one is slowly closing as he falls asleep. Radesh is the cat, in case you didn't know. He will be upset later when I try to clean up the mess he's lying on.

So, non-sequitur, Flickr has recently called out for archival photos of Berlin and the Wall. I have one of those. I remember it well- in 1989 my parents packed the car and we rode across Europe all the way to a little blue house in Ruurlo in the Netherlands. On the way we stopped in Berlin, and took pictures of the Wall. In my six year-old naïveté I couldn't fathom how a government of responsible grown ups could ever come up with an idea as ridiculous as building a wall to divide a country in two. Such methods belonged in the sandbox, I thought. Of course I was more or less aware of the lack of freedom in Poland itself, but red-tape gagging and kidnappings by the Security Office still seemed like a more reasonable approach than BUILDING A FRICKIN' WALL in the middle of a city. What if you got caught on the wrong side? What if your house was in the middle of the barrier? HOW does one even perform an operation like that?

When we arrived in Berlin, I took a kick at the wall, and then my mother took a photo. I was wearing a red tracksuit. It was not the day of the collapse, but people were still crowding around the now useless eyesore, climbing through gaps, hacking chunks of brick off with axes and picks. It was a universally hated thing, a symbol of oppression and all things Evil, and it was good to be able to kick it, though my little kiddie shoes never made a dent.

I tried to find this photo and could not, even though I'm sure it exists. The album goes straight from a DDR retreat centre in the marshes to Paris, and Ruurlo. I don't know if we kept any of the negatives- bah, I'm sure we had our own chunk of the Wall itself, but where is it today? I want to shout out: I was there! and hold proof, but I can't. In the age of "pics or it didn't happen", it's dismaying.

So that's the story of the photo I didn't find. I did, however, find some cute pictures of myself as a child, which I now include for the amusement of my friends and to the annoyance of complete strangers who have found this entry googling for photos of the Berlin Wall. ;)